Abstract
This proposal describes a build system for generating “wheel” archives and is very, very informal. This plan was drawn up after a random discussion with Jannis Liedel on Twitter and IRC.
Wheel files can be platform and Python-version dependent, a way of generating these files automatically needs to be created and linked to the Packaging Index (PyPI.)
Design
After discussions with Jannis, I believe the simplest solution would likely be the best solution for this problem. As such, I feel that using a custom-built, lightweight solution makes more sense than using something like buildbot.
Technology
I feel the platform should leverage existing Python packages that are tried, tested and well used in the community. Therefore I feel we should use a combination of the following;
- RabbitMQ for queueing builds
- Celery for building wheels and
- pyenv for managing multiple Python versions
Operating systems
I lack any understanding of Windows or Mac OS but, I believe the initial plan should cover OS X and Linux, using a distro such as Ubuntu for building Linux packages.
This way we can at least have wheels being built for OS X and Linux and work on a plan to implement a Windows solution.
PyPI
My knowledge of PyPI internals are rather lacking, therefore I have no decided how packages are passed to the build system to have their wheels built and added to the PyPI warehouse.
To begin with, we could simply provide a web form that allows a developer to upload an sdist archive and be provided links to download their generated wheel files.
While this is not a good long term solution, it would at least allow for testing of the build platform and for integration in to PyPI itself to be fully discussed and implemented.
Notes
This document is just a set of thoughts and ideas for how to do this, I’d really like to get any feedback about this so we can action it and get something going.
